Moralities of Commerce in a Northern Vietnamese Trading Community

Abstract

This chapter examines small-scale entrepreneurial morality in a trading village in northern Vietnam through the lens of three local moral discourses. In particular, it attempts to understand why, in spite of thorough socioeconomic transformation, traders’ moral discourses between the 1990s and the 2010s have remained strikingly similar. Traders’ use of a moral identity is a strategic response to the ambiguous economic and political situation in which they find themselves. The creation of this moral uncertainty is an important element of state governance.